When a tree becomes old and stops expanding, it turns
towards a more interior life.
Number 49
Lovers in Winter
The posture of the tree
Shows the prevailing wind;
And ours, long misery
When you are long unkind.
But forward, look, we lean--
Not backward as in doubt--
And still with branches green
Ride our ill weather out.
--Robert Graves, "Lovers in Winter" in Collected
Poems 1965 (London: Cassell, 1965), p. 152.
Number 48
"Though a human being is 'chemically speaking...a few buckets of water, tied up in a complicated sort of fig-leaf,' still, said Pound, we have our thoughts within us, 'as the thought of a tree is in the seed'."
Hugh Kenner on Ezra Pound in Kenner's book, The Elsewhere Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.40.
Number 47
" (I recall how) Joe Bousquet expressed the intimate space
of a tree: 'Space is nowhere. Space is inside it like honey in a
hive'."
--Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 202.
Number 46
Forget the tube of bark,
Alliterative leaves,
Tenacious like a hand,
Gnarled rootage in the dark
Interior of land.
Bright incidental bird
Whose melody is fanned
Among the bundled sheaves,
Wild spool of the winding word,
Reject: and let there be
Only tree.
--From Stanley Kunitz, "Very Tree" in The Collected Poems (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000), p. 31.
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